There isn't anything that the bitcoin foundation can do about it. If bitcoin became a powerful force, or cryptocurrencies in general, it would probably encourage governments to bring in taxes via sales tax rather than income tax.

If you guys haven't heard about FATCA, you should look it up. It's major US legislation, set to go into effect in January 2013, that requires all International Financial Institutions with American account holders to report account information to the IRS. It's a pretty big deal, but it has gotten relatively little attention from the media. Anyway, the purpose of this is to crack down on US tax evaders.

I wanted to see how you guys think this will affect BitCoin as tax cheats start looking for alternative ways to evade taxes.

If you want to avoid tax cheats, get rid of the IRS and just get all your money from sale tax. Other than that, it's an invasion of financial privacy and everybody who vote for the law should be persecuted for treason.

For one, if there were any legitimate SEC concern they'd have sent word. You don't talk to the small players (ie, GLBSE with it's 10% of the market) without talking to the big players (ie, MPEx, with its 80-90%).

Kludge: Maybe it's time you splurged the hefty sum of 20 bitcoin to move over to the one exchange that actually works. By "actually works" I mean charges 1/4 as much per transaction as GLBSE does, is down an infinity percent less and in general has an infinity percent fewer issues, troubles, problems, defects and so forth.

Nefario: You are obviously unqualified to be anywhere near a project of the complexity of an exchange, even for play money (which I suspect BTC are, for most of you here, at least judging on behavior records). I will make you precisely one offer to buy the thing from you, so you get to actually make some money for all your effort over the past year, as misguided and mismanaged as it may have been, rather than have to walk away from a worthless wreck (like Zou Thong/Amir&co have with Bitcoinica). If you have half the maturity you should have to be involved in all this you will take this offer seriously, and consider your options carefully. Feel free to make contact via pm or in #bitcoin-otc-eu.

GLBSE should have been a black market operation, no offense. The fact that the founder is known and visible and that the exchange is centralized is a big red flag.

Also, the GLBSE in its current incarnation doesn't work well with anonymity, as there were a number of scams and scandals that were the result. If you could solve the scamming problem, unsanctioned and unauthorized business will have a place in the world. Other than that, a GLBSE is not a good idea.

An autonomous, self-regulating monetary system with un-tweakable hardcoded constants will render obsolete not just the idea of central planning, but also as the armies of "economists" employed to justify it.

What you're saying? Bitcoin is a goldmine of information for any economist. All the information about economic flow is public, yo!

NSA is not always an evil organization that seeks to add a backdoor to everything, ya know? How would NSA like it if they propose a backdoor to their own government, and enemies use said backdoor to break into it? It would be beyond stupid.